I will vacillate between free-form movement exploration and structured sequence building for the sake of environmental art-ivism.

What does incubation mean to you?
Pressurized containment for the sake of creativity.

I will be working to reinvigorate my practice and hopefully develop more consistency and uninhibited creativity.

What does incubation mean to you?
Incubation to me is the time prior to insight. It’s getting ready, it’s patience.

Alongside my fellow artists, I seize LEMAY residency opportunity to start crafting an immersive and multi-faceted performance on the theme of environment.

What does incubation mean to you?
Dedicated time for exploration, craft and growth.

This Fall I will be developing new dance and theatrical material for a work premiering at Triskelion Arts April 2023.

What does incubation mean to you?
The beginning of something that keeps evolving and growing.

Through choreographed films and live performances, we’re working to challenge the status-quo and create unconventional and radically vulnerable work which helps us make sense of our changing world and reimagine how dance exists in our spaces and in our bodies.

What does incubation mean to you?
“an environment that allows an idea to develop, mature and reach its full potential.”

I will be working on a new piece that situates nationalism and ensuing warfare on brown bodies within myth

What does incubation mean to you?

Loving on your ideas with inspiration, space, and time.

Andrea Soto, raised in Juarez, is a first generation Mexican American movement artist and collaborator whose craft lives in performance and data-gathering. Her last public piece, Multitude (1-2) was presented at MAK Center for Art and Architecture for the opening of VALIE EXPORT: EMBODIED in Los Angeles. Andrea holds the body as our temple of pleasure and truth system; she creates poetic ecosystems rooted in non-hierarchical ways of making and being. A graduate from California Institute of the Arts, she is the recipient of the 2024 Barbara Ensley Award on behalf of the Merce Cunningham Trust, and the 2023 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Notable collaborations include projects with mentors such as Rosie Herrera, Julie Tolentino, Yusha-Marie Sorzano, Rosanna Tavarez, and Sam Wentz. Her performances span national and international platforms, and she continues to work as a dancer, performer, and movement director across Los Angeles, New York and London.

Chaery Moon embarked on her dance journey with the Korean National Ballet and the Korea National Institute for the Gifted in Arts, earning early recognition by winning the Tanzolymp in Berlin. She obtained her BFA at The Juilliard School and later joined the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon in France, where she expanded her repertoire across diverse dance forms and cultures.

Upon returning to the U.S., Moon pursued an MFA in Dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Since then, she has been creating works that merge physical movement with the intricacies of human experience through collaborative processes with artists from various genres. She is a certified Cunningham Technique® instructor and actively participates in projects affiliated with the Merce Cunningham Trust, transcending Merce’s legacy.

In 2017, Moon founded Chaery Moon Dance (CMD), where she creates works for stage, film, and site-specific performances. Her creations have garnered recognition and support from NYFA, the Korean government, the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Downtown Brooklyn, and the Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation. Her leadership in collaborative projects has been featured in The New York Times, Baryshnikov Arts, Schön! Magazine and Vogue Hong Kong. Moon’s writing has also been published in Dance and People and Dance magazines in South Korea. (www.chaerymoon.com)

Nikki Theroux is a dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA in Dance Performance from Marymount Manhattan College and has additionally studied with the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company’s International Dance Program under the direction of Danielle Ohn, and Big Bang with Stéphanie Decourteille in Montreal. Nikki has performed and presented work in venues including the Park Avenue Armory, the Joyce Theater, Westbeth, and Bryant Park. Currently, Nikki is working with More Fish Dance Company under the direction of Doron Perk. She is also a co-founder of Wildflower Collective, alongside her longtime collaborator, Dale Ratcliff. The two are developing their newest duet, “Return,” and have been supported by Moulin/Belle in France to expand the work in 2025. Nikki is very excited to be a part of the LEIMAY INCUBATOR Program and to dive into a patient creative process.

Sebastian Arredondo, frequently known as Sea, is a multi-hyphenate movement artist from Southern California. Recently relocating to New York City, they are exploring the relationship between movement cultivation and music production, examining how these two processes intertwine. Drawing from a blend of contemporary modern technique and hip-hop styles, such as waving, they aim to challenge themselves by discovering new ways to create movement and immersive audience experiences that are sensory expansive. Now embarking on their journey into music production, Sea hopes to find ways to align their choreography with the original music and sounds they create themselves.

Julia Lawton is a New York-based dancer and choreographer, and the Artistic Director of Lawton Dance Collective. She graduated from Adelphi University in spring of 2024 with her BFA in dance, as well as a minor in Art and Design Education and as a member of the Honors College. Throughout college, she performed works by numerous choreographers, including Paul Taylor, Orion Duckstein, and Frank Augustyn. Julia currently dances in the professional division at The Taylor School and works as The Taylor School Associate and as a Community Director at Arts On Site.

Julia has presented her work at numerous venues, including Arts On Site, The Workroom Theater – Northampton, The Emelin Theatre, The Tank, Balance Arts Center, American College Dance Association Northeast Conference, and Mashup Dance International Women’s Day Dance Festival.

Shira Kagan-Shafman is a New York based dancer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist. She has performed in works throughout theaters and museums in New York including, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Poster House museum, Arts on Site, Spring for Spring Dance Festival, Triskelion Arts and Green Space. She was a recipient of the 2023 B. Wilson Foundation grant for which she produced, choreographed and performed in a production at Baryshnikov Arts Center in the John Cage and Merce Cunningham studio and was a 2023 artist-in-residence at Mother’s Milk.

Kagan-Shafman has had the pleasure of performing in works by Joanna Kotze, Mariana Valencia, Peggy Florin, Caitlin Corbett, Kelley Donovan, Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, Dean Moss, Rebecca Stenn, jess pretty and the Aston Magna Music Festival. In 2021, she participated in Arts on Site Residency in process for her work, To Breathe Over Seas, which premiered in December 2021. She received her BA in Dance from the New School and spent a semester studying in Israel through DanceJerusalem. There she trained in Gaga and danced in Ohad Naharin repertory, including sections of Sadeh 21, Mamootot, Hora and Last Work along with performing in new works by Roni Chadash and Noa Zuk.

Her work often involves multidisciplinary collaborations including partnering with visual artists and sound artists. With longtime collaborator and violinist, Leandria Lott, her piece, Anchor in Continuum, premiered at Poster House museum and has been restaged at Triskelion Arts and Green Space.

Sofia Engelman & Em Papineau are life partners and choreographic collaborators living in Lenapehoking // Brooklyn, NY. ​Sofia + Em’s first collaborative project was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts while they were students at Smith College. Since then, they have held choreographic residencies at The Croft, Mana Contemporary, The Living Room, Ponderosa, The Dance Complex, MOtiVE Brooklyn, Sky Hill Farm Studio, The Floor on Atlantic, College of the Atlantic, and School for Contemporary Dance & Thought. In addition to presenting their work at these residency spaces, the pair have performed at festivals including FRESH Festival, EstroGenius Festival, AS220’s Providence Movement Festival, Queer Spectra, Post/Future Performance Festival, and Dancing Queerly Boston, as well as other spaces they love dearly such as Judson Church, Green Street Studios, BAAD!, Triskelion Arts, and freeskewl. Their work has been supported by NEFA, NYFA, FCA, and Northampton Arts Council and their individual performance credits include projects by Kathleen Hermesdorf, Tyler Rai, Michael Figueroa, David Appel, Christina-Noel Reeves, Claudia-Lynn Rightmire, Simon Thomas-Train, Angie Hauser, and Alice Gosti. They founded and directed freeskewl, a platform for dance, discussion, education, and reparations during the COVID pandemic.

Maho Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NYC. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated body movements, and she has built a database, “Minimum Movement Catalog” (https://minimum-movement-demo.web.app/movements). Maho Ogawa uses body, video, text, computer programming, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously.

Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture and cinema. She’s working on public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about “silence,” providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. The aim is to empower the erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as an archive and audience-participating event, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways.

Maho’s works have been shown in Asia and in the U.S.A., including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Emily Harvey Foundation, to name a few. Ogawa received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and creation support at LMCC, Culture Push, Emily Harvey Foundation, LEIMAY, and New Dance Alliance. She is a 2023 Associated Artist at the Culture Push.

Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist, director, experimental archivist and organizer who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of their practice. Blending performance with practice-based and studio research and engaging ensembles in facilitated processes, they create fleeting performance works that examine perception in shared experiences. Acosta has presented her works with and for Museum of Art and Design, MCA Chicago, Chocolate Factory Theatre, Knockdown Center, the Current Sessions, Miami Performance International Festival, IN>Time Symposium, Abrons Arts Center, and the Performance Philosophy conference.

As dramaturg Acosta has collaborated with artist Miguel Gutierrez, on multiple projects including Cela nous concerne tous (This concerns all of us) Ballet de Lorraine, France, This Bridge Called My Ass in 2019 for American Realness, and Super Nothing premiering at NYLA Jan 2025. Recent choreographer collaborations include Jessie Young, Kayla Hamilton, Leslie Cuyjet and Amber Sloane.

The curatorial performance experiment Sunday Service ran for 6 seasons co-created by Alexis Wilkinson at Knockdown Center. Later reuniting with Wilkinson as curator for Good Day God Damn at the Chocolate Factory Theatre, a solo exhibition, with accompanying talk show Apocalypse Talks, speaking on themes of multi-crisis making and radical hope found in art practices. Delving further into lost histories Acosta joined as lead archivist for the AUNTS Archive and the Jo Andres Archive for which they have curated exhibitions of the artists catalogue alongside Laurie Berg.

Currently, Acosta is developing multiple performance works including a techno-opera with artist Alexa Grae, Tone Pillar, which combines mystical nightlife, surrealist staging and multi media production with live operatic scores alongside an series of studio works, videos and plays, Lichen Baby…It’s Me Moss, entangles dual research threads looking at lichen’s symbiosis and moss’s natural structure to find poetics of being.

Ash Rucker received a bachelor’s in Fashion Merchandising from Buffalo State University and the Fashion Institute of Technology. After graduating, Ash moved to New York and interned for Betsy Johnson, W magazine, and designer Mara Hoffman after shortly settling at Loreal. Since then Ash has shifted careers and is the founder of a non-profit organization Therapart. Working with youth has been impacted by the criminal justice system. Ash has recently completed a fellowship at the New School and Columbia University with her work centered around healing through modalities such as somatic-based movement, meditation, and art therapy practices. Aside from working with the youth, Ash holds somatic-based movement classes in NYC, LA, Mexico, and Europe which has led her down a path of intuitive-based movement direction. Ash uses her deep study of movement to develop her unique intuitive-led movement direction and facilitator. Ash has worked with brands such as Loewe, Rag & Bone, and photographer Ryan McGinley and recently performed at the New Museum. Ash is known to many as an energetic architect of the mind, body, and soul.